Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen Dev Accused Of Taking Crowd Funds For Personal Use

In the latest stir around troubled project, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, developer Brad Mcquaid has been called out for allegedly taking salary advances from crowd-funded resources. In a thread that has since been closed, a user discusses an interview with the developer, during the current struggles to produce the game.

A post also supposedly appeared through the official Facebook page of Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen addressing the claim. We couldn’t verify it, as it wasn’t on the page at the time of writing.

In the interview, the comments are directed towards McQuaid taking between $35 and $45 thousand from Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen’s own funding campaign, to alleviate personal affairs. That money has since been spent, leaving the already shaky financial state of the game worse off than it was.

Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen initially failed to drum up a sizable amount of $800,000 to recreate a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game in the classic style of the genre. McQuaid was at the helm of EverQuest’s success, one of the first huge MMO releases.

After the Kickstarter, the team ran its own campaign on their own site, mustering up almost $150,000, but ultimately a lot less than the first target. Since then, production of the game has grinded to a halt or much lower pace, as funds depleted.

With the new accusations, it looks like finances would at least have been mismanaged, though some would call it embezzlement. Funds would currently only lead towards producing a showable product to investors.

Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen is ongoing development, but currently looking for volunteers to produce the MMO with unpaid labor. There is a faint promise of paid work, once the game is picked up.

Daav has been playing games since Atari was a thing and still likes games that look old, but also new stuff. There's no allegiance to platforms or genres; anything big and small can make a good game. This gives him a ton of perspectives to write about.